I’m going to share with you a classic 1947 American Christmas movie, Miracle on 34th Street., an excellent case study for propaganda in opening days of the Cold War.
Miracle on 34th Street is a great romantic comedy and I love this movie, but I have to recognize that all the moral lessons are really terrible. And this is 1947, a good illustration that America’s problems are not new.
The movie is about a guy named Kris Kringle in New York City who is convinced he is Santa Claus. Literally Santa Claus. He is is a likeable and compelling guy who has a way with people, which eventually lands him a job as — you guessed it — Santa Claus at a Macy’s shopping mall. The marketing manager who hired him, Doris, is a savvy white collar professional with a young daughter, Susan. One of Doris’s neighbors is a charismatic young defense attorney, Fred, who is romantically interested in her so invents excuses to visit frequently.
As you can probably deduce by now, the plot focuses on Doris and Fred, with Kris/Santa Claus as the McGuffin, the plot device, who drives the story forward.
In his role as the store Santa Claus, Kris directs a distraught mother to go to Gimbels, a competing store, to buy a toy fire truck. The manager of the toy department is furious and is about to fire Kris, but the owner of Macy’s is a shrewd businessman who realizes the potential in what Kris is doing. By giving customers honest answers about where they can purchase hard-to-find products, that’ll encourage them to come back. So he not only allows “Santa Claus” to continue sending customers to their competition, he instructs all of the employees to do this when a certain product isn’t available at Macy’s.
And just to be clear, there was absolutely no Christmas spirit in what Macy’s was doing, this was a completely transparent sales strategy to turn one-time buyers into lifelong customers. Keep that in mind for later.
Kris’s presence in their lives creates conflict between Doris and Fred. Doris is completely against telling her daughter things that are not true, so of course always maintained that Santa Claus is a fictional character who’s not real. But Fred tells Susan that no, Santa Claus is in fact real (a little rude to contradict a parent’s wishes, but anyway). Just to add fuel to the fire, Kris confirms Fred’s statements, he is indeed the Santa Claus.
One important detail I’ll bring up now. Doris’s motivation for telling Susan that Santa isn’t real is not really honest. See, Doris wanted a Prince Charming in her life, but he turned out to be an asshole and she divorced him. So Doris is motivated by bitterness, not logic.
Unlike the other children, Susan continues expressing skepticism that Kris is Santa Claus. So early in the movie, Kris makes it his personal mission to convince Susan, and Susan specifically, that he is Santa Claus. Susan admits to him that she would like to live in a detached suburban house, and Kris promises to get it for her – which sounds absurd, and is absurd, but just wait.
The Macy’s employee psychologist is giving bad life advice to a young janitor and causing him emotional trauma. This angers Kris so much he confronts the psychologist and physically assaults him. The assault in front of witnesses, combined with his insistence on literally being Santa Claus, is enough to send Kris to a court hearing to determine whether or not he should be confined in a mental institution.
Fred agrees to represent Kris in the trial pro bono. Meanwhile, the District Attorney is told by one of his advisors that prosecuting “Santa Claus” is very bad for public relations and will hurt his upcoming reelection bid. But the DA argues that the laws is the law. Despite Fred’s best efforts to argue that belief in being Santa Claus (and violently attacking another person) aren’t grounds for being declared insane, it seems certain that the DA will succeed in confining Kris to a mental institution.
With all hope seemingly lost, Doris breaks down and tells Susan that she was wrong and Santa Claus is real. So together they write a letter to Santa Claus, and address it to Kris at the courthouse. This little act of faith sparks a miracle. The workers at the postal service come across the strange letter, and decide that this is a sufficient bureaucratic justification to send all of the children’s Santa Claus letters to Kris.
The next day, Fred is able to present tens of thousands of children’s letters to Kris as evidence that he is in fact Santa Claus. the Post Office is a Federal agency and they have identified Kris as Santa Claus, so it must be true. Thanks to this legal trick, Kris is acquitted.
Everything is good, Doris and Fred are in love, and go off together with Susan. Then in the final moments of the film, it is revealed that Kris fulfilled his earlier promise to acquire a stylish single-family home for Susan.
It’s a nice movie, but the morals are a bit questionable to say the least. I couldn’t quite figure out the exact reason why until today. Basically all of the characters are motivated by sentimentality.
The Britannica Dictionary defines “sentimental” as:
based on, showing, or resulting from feelings or emotions rather than reason or thought
Doris is not a rational person. She has a girlish fantasy of meeting Prince Charming that she still clung to even after her divorce. Fred is not a particularly rational person either. He impulsively chases every interesting object happens to wander in front of him. He aggressively courts Doris without thinking about if he would even like being married to her. Later he quits his nice job at a law firm to represent Kris, even though the case is totally insane.
As for Kris, he’s either a dangerous psychopath who does in fact believe he’s Santa Claus, or he’s a manipulative liar. The fact that he becomes so fixated on convincing a random child that he’s Santa isn’t a particularly good indicator of his overall mental stability. Somehow buying or stealing an entire house for her isn’t a thing normal people do. Susan is from an affluent family that already has a nice apartment in central New York. She doesn’t need a house. It’s also extremely troubling that when Kris was angered by the psychologist, he instantly resorted to violence.
What’s especially interesting is that at one point, Kris meets a Dutch war orphan (this was 1947, after all). Nobody asked that little girl if she would like a house. But who cares about the poor dumb war orphan?
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a movie showing people acting irrationally. The problem here is that this movie does not at any point suggest that acting irrationally is bad. Quite the opposite. The only person who acts rationally in this whole movie is the district attorney. He’s just trying to do his job and enforce justice, and he’s punished for it. He’s actually the one on trial and the subject of public ridicule for not believing in Santa Claus (and his right to exercise extra-judicial violence on anyone who angers him). It’s like a pseudo-Maoist struggle session against the hapless DA for his audacity to suggest Santa Claus isn’t real. Hell, what am I saying, this movie was before the cultural revolution. It was red-blooded capitalist Americans who invented the struggle session, not the Chinese Maoists.
I bet that DA was a commie too. And speaking of commies, the struggle session in this movie was not unlike the real-life Red Scare that followed not long after.
The house was significant and I don’t consider it coincidental. It’s a symbol of American superiority in an era of commie blocks. War-devastated cities in Europe were rebuilt with boring apartment buildings. But back in the USA, rich white girls like Susan lived in cool detached houses, which proved America was better. Duh. Don’t ask about what black girls were living in at the time. Black people don’t exist in this movie, and that’s deliberate. Cold War Hollywood movies were all about proving that America was better than everywhere else, and showing ghettos would be bad for public relations.
But like everything else in this movie, the house is sentimentality. Susan’s life isn’t quantitatively better after moving to the house. She just wanted it for purely sentimental reasons.
Generations of us have been brainwashed to the cult of sentimentality. Even seemingly harmless children’s stories serve the purpose of propagandizing people to sentimental consumerists. A while back I wrote a review of Toy Story. Of course it’s a classic from my childhood, but the message was extremely problematic.
Toy Story was part of a massive propaganda push in the 1990s by American toy companies to convince children to treat their toys like actual living beings that should be loved like a pet, or even another person. Americans reading this might remember the Beanie Babies craze, when children were encouraged to buy cute beanbag animals, but treat them as precious, fragile collector’s items, not toys to be roughly played with like children normally want to do. And now we can see the consequences of this corporate marketing trend. Huge numbers of people, even adults, pathologically collecting toys and treating them with the same reverence as a spouse or their own offspring.
Despite being very different movies about different topics, Miracle on 34th Street and Toy Story push the same attitude of consumerism based on sentimentality. You should love and cherish this toy (or house) because Santa Claus gave it to you. And you should love your toys because they’re literally alive. Notice how in both stories, parents are deliberately distanced from the act of gift giving to children. The gift is coming from Santa Claus – aka – a corporation posing as Santa Claus.
Both movies also deliberately blur the divide between reality and make-believe, and in not necessarily helpful way.
Sentimentality is the basis of modern propaganda. Compelling people to think sentimentally, rather than reasonably or morally, is the key to manipulating them.
[I]n 1928, the American Tobacco Company hired Edward Bernays, a young hotshot marketer with wild ideas and even wilder marketing campaigns.
Bernays’ marketing tactics at the time were unlike anybody else’s in the industry. Back in the early 20th century, marketing was seen simply as a means of communicating the tangible, real benefits of a product in the simplest and most concise form possible. It was believed at the time that people bought based on facts and information. If someone wanted to buy cheese, then you must communicate to them the facts of why your cheese was superior (“Freshest french goat milk, cured 12 days, shipped refrigerated!”). People were seen as rational actors making rational purchasing decisions for themselves.
But Bernays was more unconventional. Bernays didn’t believe that people made rational decisions most of the time. In fact, he believed that people were fundamentally irrational and so you had to appeal to them on an emotional and unconscious level.
Whereas the tobacco industry had been focused on convincing individual women to buy and smoke cigarettes, Bernays saw it as an emotional and cultural issue. If Bernays wanted women to smoke, then he had to shift that balance and turn smoking into a positive emotional experience for women by reshaping the cultural perceptions of smoking.
To accomplish this, Bernays hired a group of women and got them into the Easter Sunday Parade in New York City. Today, big holiday parades are cheesy things you let drone on the television while you fall asleep on the couch. But back in those days, parades were big social events, kind of like the Super Bowl or something.
Bernays planned it so that these women in the parade, at the appropriate moment, would all stop and light up cigarettes at the same time. Then, Bernays hired photographers to take flattering photos of the women which he then passed out to all of the major national newspapers. Bernays then told the reporters that these ladies were not just lighting cigarettes, but they were lighting “torches of freedom,” demonstrating their ability to assert their own independence and be their own woman.
I don’t think even the most shrewd and cynical propagandists working for Stalin would be able to think of calling cigarettes “torches of freedom,” even if you gave them a thousand years and unlimited resources.
Capitalist Russia is just as bad at propaganda. I’ve been here a couple of years, and Russian advertisements are all some variation of “buy this product because, uhh, it’s cheap and good.” Even when Russians were directly trying to copy Americans they were still bad at it. Hysterical sentimental nonsense like “Inhaling these cancer sticks will literally make you a better and more free person” is just not something the Russian mind is capable of, it’s outside their mental universe. If you tell a Russian woman that smoking “torches of freedom” will make her a more free person, she’ll just look at you like you’re retarded (which happened to me just now as I was writing this).
The root cause of this difference in propaganda is sentimentality. American and American vassal audiences feel and act much more out of sentimentality than Russians, and that’s the result of deliberate conditioning since Bernays came up with his ploy to convince women that smoking “torches of freedumb” would make them more independent and free. Incidentally, the Russian equivalent of Santa Claus, Father Frost and Snow Maiden, were never presented to children as real people who actually exist.
When it comes to war propaganda, it’s great to have your audience trained to accept a “truth” because it feels good, and it does not matter if it’s actually true or not. “Ghost of Kiev” shooting down 10 billion airplanes, or Russian soldiers stealing toilets are stories that don’t make any sense, but they push emotional buttons. After a person has been taught his whole life various lies, like that Santa Claus is real, beanie babies are valuable, and cigarettes are torches of freedumb, it’s easy to convince him of a new lie.
War propaganda is particularly pervasive and complements peacetime propaganda. The average person has doubts about himself and the society around him, and might actually be relieved to see a barrage of propaganda assuring him that, no matter how unhappy he is, there is this other country that’s evil and full of bad people, and things are much worse over there.
A person who supports a war for sentimental reasons, rather than logical ones, is impossible to reason with. The Russians are evil rapist orcs who steal toilets and want to ruin all of our freedumbs – a person who believes this cannot be dissuaded, and I have tried. There’s no point.
Ian Kummer
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I sometimes copy and paste the better Quora essays that come across my feed into word documents, and did so for this one. Its an excellent breakdown of the propaganda that twentieth century Americans got all the time, including myself, and from quite early on.
I also love this movie, but in my last viewing, I noticed something that didn’t make the review. As you point out, the happy ending of the movie is that the couple and the daughter take a trip out to the suburbs, and discover a suburban house, and that is their reward. You also point out that there was nothing wrong with the living arrangements they already had in Manhattan.
The year the movie came out, 1947, coincided with a huge push in the media to sell Americans on living in the suburbs. This meant leaving central cities, where there were abundant transportation and commercial options, to go to newly constructed neighborhoods that consisted only of houses in yards, where you needed a personal car (more than one for families) for transportation and there wasn’t much in the way of commercial options or transportation. These neighborhoods were built quickly and cheaply, so the houses were built first before anything else.
Now there was a genuine housing crisis in the years after World War II, and much of the housing in established towns and cities really was overcrowded, and getting more expensive. The cheapest and quickest option was to build lots of houses in the country, but somewhat close to the city, and encourage people to move there and to figure out how to get to their jobs.
Also, I suspect there were people in the federal government who looked the damage to German and Japanese cities from strategic bombing campaigns, and there was a quiet push to much as many people and factories out of central cities as possible. American federal and state governments still legally just can’t order people to relocate, so this was done through market manipulation and propaganda. In the USSR, heavy investment in civil defense, air defense, and shelters (including the Moscow subway) was employed instead.
So you get things like the last scene in “Miracle on 34th Street”, but its jarring in that case since little in the movie leads up to that.
I think this transition to a car based life had been pushed by a lobby group as well, and they were also successful in destroying most public transportation in cities. It was a conscious strategy of Alfred Sloan and similar oligarchs.
This sentimentality was the main theme in “Son of Saul”, a Hungarian picture that won an Oscar a few years ago. The main hero wanted to do an entirely symbolic act out of sentimentality. The whole thing was completely irrational, no one supported it, it actually hindered a rational act (an uprising in the death camp), and eventually directly contributed to the death of the hero and a few others. For me the whole thing looked like the liberal activism of the last few decades, the “raising awareness” type things where symbolic actions (that never actually threaten the status quo) are used instead of anything that is actually able to achieve even a minimal change. Okay, in “Son of Saul” arguably there was a change, in the wrong direction.